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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ede3cc5 | Did I remember to sleep in? Take lots of pills? Commit irreversible sins? | Alkaline Trio | ||
| 94088eb | Puffed up beyond measure is he in his own conceit, and folk say it is a grief to him that none hath been found this long while that durst wrastle with him, and wofully he pineth for the hundredth. He shall wrastle a fall with me! | E.R. Eddison | ||
| 2390884 | A great king should rather be a dog that killeth clean, than a cat that patteth and sporteth with his prey. | ruler | E. R. Eddison | |
| 2741626 | Drunkenness is better for the body than physic! Drink always, and you shall never die! | alcoholism drunkenness immortality | E.R. Eddison | |
| 54fbedb | Yet remember that hard it is to lift a full cup without spilling. | E.R. Eddison | ||
| ab94afc | Kings and governors that do exult in strength and beauty and lustihood and rich apparel, showing themselves for awhile upon the stage of the world and open dominion of high heaven, what are they but the gilded summer fly that decayeth with the dying day? | E.R. Eddison | ||
| d4eba53 | Thou art nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams, nothing. The little dead earth-louse were of greater avail than thou, were it not nothing as thou art nothing. For all is nothing: earth and sky and sea and they that dwell therein. Nor shall this illusion comfort thee, if it might, that when thou art abolished these things shall endure for a season, stars and months return, and men grow old and die, and new men and wo.. | nihilism | E.R. Eddison | |
| 0f8f7c0 | He bowed his head as if to avoid a blow, so plain he seemed to hear somewhat within him crying with a high voice and loud, "Thou art nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams, nothing. The little dead earth-louse were of greater avail than thou, were it not nothing as thou art nothing. For all is nothing: earth and sky and sea and they that dwell therein. Nor shall this illusion comfort thee, if it might, that when thou.. | E.R. Eddison | ||
| 5ae9aae | Oaths be of the heart, and he that breaketh them in open fact is oft, as now, no breaker in truth, for already were they scorned and trampled on by his opposites. | E.R. Eddison | ||
| f32849c | If it was up to me, I'd never have to miss you. | Alkaline Trio | ||
| 67910ed | Never had a drink that I didn't like. Got a taste of you, threw up all night. | Alkaline Trio | ||
| 3e5bd01 | The success of the scaling-up process depends upon the fact that the conceptual integrity of each piece has been radically improved--that the number of minds determining the design has been divided by seven. So it is possible to put 200 people on a problem and face the problem of coordinating only 20 minds, those of the surgeons. For that coordination problem, however, separate techniques must be used, and these are discussed in succeeding .. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| de735a5 | I don't blame you for walking away; I'd do the same if I saw me. I swear it's not contagious. | Alkaline Trio | ||
| 5ca23ca | I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| d49fae3 | The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another. So the whole process is two steps forward and one step back. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 6f3cb6a | Because ease of use is the purpose, this ratio of function to conceptual complexity is the ultimate test of system design. Neither function alone nor simplicity alone defines a good design. This point is widely misunderstood. Operating System/360 is hailed by its builders as the finest ever built, because it indisputably has the most function. Function, and not simplicity, has always been the measure of excellence for its designers. On the .. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 09ddeb5 | By the architecture of a system, I mean the complete and detailed specification of the user interface. For a computer this is the programming manual. For a compiler it is the language manual. For a control program it is the manuals for the language or languages used to invoke its functions. For the entire system it is the union of the manuals the user must consult to do his entire job. The architect of a system, like the architect of a buil.. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 821e02c | Indeed, the cost-performance ratio of the product will depend most heavily on the implementer, just as ease of use depends most heavily on the architect. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 511efd0 | Conceptual integrity does require that a system reflect a single philosophy and that the specification as seen by the user flow from a few minds. Because of the real division of labor into architecture, implementation, and realization, however, this does not imply that a system so designed will take longer to build. Experience shows the opposite, that the integral system goes together faster and takes less time to test. In effect, a widespr.. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 9eb0492 | the true implementers are intimately involved in the design process; their broad experience provides the balance for a designer's limited implementation examples. (In | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 26f0808 | For it to be successful, the architect must * remember that the builder has the inventive and creative responsibility for the implementation; so the architect suggests, not dictates; * always be prepared to suggest a way of implementing anything he specifies, and be prepared to accept any other way that meets the objectives as well; * deal quietly and privately in such suggestions; * be ready to forego credit for suggested improvements. Nor.. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 2aba511 | The manual, or written specification, is a necessary tool, though not a sufficient one. The manual is the external specification of the product. It describes and prescribes every detail of what the user sees. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| a15fa4e | The manual, or written specification, is a necessary tool, though not a sufficient one. The manual is the external specification of the product. It describes and prescribes every detail of what the user sees. As such, it is the chief product of the architect. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 2b09880 | Why Have Formal Documents? First, writing the decisions down is essential. Only when one writes do the gaps appear and the inconsistencies protrude. The act of writing turns out to require hundreds of mini-decisions, and it is the existence of these that distinguishes clear, exact policies from fuzzy ones. Second, the documents will communicate the decisions to others. The manager will be continually amazed that policies he took for common .. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| b3154b8 | If there are n workers on a project, there are (n2-n)/2 interfaces across which there may be communication, and there are potentially almost 2n teams within which coordination must occur. The purpose of organization is to reduce the amount of communication and coordination necessary; hence organization is a radical attack on the communication problems treated above. The means by which communication is obviated are division of labor and spec.. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 7435282 | Finally, a manager's documents give him a data base and checklist. By reviewing them periodically he sees where he is, and he sees what changes of emphasis or shifts in direction are needed. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 91c9c63 | The job done least well by project managers is to utilize the technical genius who is not strong on management talent. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| f2aa454 | Dream a good one tonight, I'll listen to the bad ones when they come. | Alkaline Trio | ||
| 10af779 | Structuring an organization for change is much harder than designing a system for change. Each man must be assigned to jobs that broaden him, so that the whole force is technically flexible. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 062b213 | Program maintenance involves no cleaning, lubrication, or repair of deterioration. It consists chiefly of changes that repair design defects. Much more often than with hardware, these changes include added functions. Usually they are visible to the user. The total cost of maintaining a widely used program is typically 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it. Surprisingly, this cost is strongly affected by the number of users. More u.. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 3a06a41 | Any attempt to fix it with minimum effort will repair the local and obvious, but unless the structure is pure or the documentation very fine, the far-reaching effects of the repair will be overlooked. Second, the repairer is usually not the man who wrote the code, and often he is a junior programmer or trainee. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 57abd01 | I do not believe we will find the magic here. Program verification is a very powerful concept, and it will be very important for such things as secure operating system kernels. The technology does not promise, however, to save labor. Verifications are so much work that only a few substantial programs have ever been verified. Program verification does not mean error-proof programs. There is no magic here, either. Mathematical proofs also can.. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| a46ee54 | Even at a cost of $100,000, a purchased piece of software is costing only about as much as one programmer-year. And delivery is immediate! Immediate at least for products that really exist, products whose developer can refer the prospect to a happy user. Moreover, such products tend to be much better documented and somewhat better maintained than homegrown software. The development of the mass market is, I believe, the most profound long-ru.. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| c6d5030 | The big change has been in the hardware/software cost ratio. The buyer of a $2-million machine in 1960 felt that he could afford $250,000 more for a customized payroll program, one that slipped easily and nondisruptively into the computer-hostile social environment. Buyers of $50,000 office machines today cannot conceivably afford customized payroll programs; so they adapt their payroll procedures to the packages available. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 2184041 | Nothing even convincing, much less exciting, has yet emerged from such efforts. I am persuaded that nothing will. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| e6c807d | Therefore the most important function that software builders do for their clients is the iterative extraction and refinement of the product requirements. For the truth is, the clients do not know what they want. They usually do not know what questions must be answered, and they almost never have thought of the problem in the detail that must be specified. Even the simple answer--"Make the new software system work like our old manual informa.. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 76c0ee8 | If, as I believe, the conceptual structures we construct today are too complicated to be accurately specified in advance, and too complex to be built faultlessly, then we must take a radically different approach. Let us turn to nature and study complexity in living things, instead of just the dead works of man. Here we find constructs whose complexities thrill us with awe. The brain alone is intricate beyond mapping, powerful beyond imitati.. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| efc0558 | I believe that large programming projects suffer management problems different in kind from small ones, due to division of labor. I believe the critical need to be the preservation of the conceptual integrity of the product itself. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| e65dafe | I have long enjoyed asking candidate programmers, "Where is next November?" If the question is too cryptic, then, "Tell me about your mental model of the calendar." The really good programmers have strong spatial senses; they usually have geometric models of time; and they quite often understand the first question without elaboration. They have highly individualistic models." | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 4fea4aa | Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.) Yet th.. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 546ecaa | First, one must perform perfectly. The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program.[1] | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 2e0382e | Simplicity and straightforwardness proceed from conceptual integrity. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| a626d88 | Fifth, when schedule slippage is recognized, the natural (and traditional) response is to add manpower. Like dousing a fire with gasoline, this makes matters worse, much worse. More fire requires more gasoline, and thus begins a regenerative cycle which ends in disaster. | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. | ||
| 0a4c273 | For the human makers of things, the incompletenesses and inconsistencies of our ideas become clear only during implementation. Thus it is that writing, experimentation, "working out" are essential disciplines for the theoretician." | Frederick P. Brooks Jr. |